Leave it to Li-mei to forget about duty. I couldn't believe she was making me work so late! Actually, I could. Mei was always telling me, "We can do our patrol later. I wanna check out the moonrise from South Campus." I guess that was fine. I would grumble about not doing our second patrol until 1:00 in the morning, but in reality, I didn't have anything going on tomorrow anyway. As RAs, we had to return to campus a few days before classes started back in January. Duty was just an obligation to go through the motions. Of the 1,000 or so residents of our building, maybe 100 of them had chosen to leave their families and friends behind after Christmas and return to this ghost town of a college. Like the freshmen, I didn't have anything to do. I was just kicking around for the weekend, waiting for classes to resume.
Nonetheless: "I can't complain, but sometimes I still do..." I hummed as I made my way to Mei's room on the 6th floor. Her door was propped wide open with a big rock she had found on some midnight exploration and thought looked cool. I knocked once and let myself in. "Ready to go?"
Mei was sitting cross legged in an armchair facing the door. She looked up from her book when I entered. "Hey, Ethan. Sure, let's go." As she uncrossed her legs and stood, her turquoise t-shirt rode up her thighs to such a point that I saw her tangled bush.
"Mei! Careful with that thing. There are a few students here, ya know. Your door is wide open!"
"Eh." Mei responded.
I shook my head and followed Mei into the hall. Apparently, she'd be doing patrol tonight in just that t-shirt. I chuckled to myself as I watched her pad barefoot down the hall. We perfunctorily checked the bathrooms for the smell of tobacco, checked that the fire extinguishers were properly pressurized, and listened for any noise violations. It was all a tedious routine, made more superfluous by the distinct lack of a student body. After no more than 40 seconds, we called the 6th floor "checked" and made our way up to the 7th.
As we ambled down the 7th floor corridor, I picked up my conversation with Mei. "All I'm saying is, one day you're gonna get caught with your pants down, literally, and then you're gonna be in trouble."
"Eh." Mei repeated. "There's basically no one on campus, there's certainly no one in the halls at 1AM, and also, I'm very sneaky. As a matter of fact, I could take this shirt off too and no one would catch me."
"The amount of clothing doesn't affect your likelihood of getting caught - just the consequences if you do..."
Mei rolled her eyes at me. She stopped walking a moment, checked briefly over her shoulder, crossed her arms, and removed her shirt. As my eyes bugged out, Mei strolled out ahead of me down the hallway, stark naked, with her shirt hanging limply from one hand, the bottom corner dragging along the carpet. Having known Mei for over a year by this point, I'd already seen her naked on several occasions, but her audacity to walk naked through our workplace surprised me.
When I collected my jaw off the floor and screwed my Tex Avery eyes back into their sockets, I jogged to catch up with Mei. "You're insane," I informed her.
"Eh." Mei answered with a smile.
We finished the seventh floor in much the same manner as we did the sixth. As we descended the stairs, Mei dropped her shirt near the stairwell exit to her floor, then continued on down to the fifth.
The fifth and fourth floors were uneventful as we did our patrol and made our small talk. When we reached the third floor laundry room, we both stopped. There was a freshman guy in there moving his clothes from the washer to the dryer.
"Damnit! How has he even accumulated enough dirty clothes to need to wash already? He can't have been back at campus for more than two days!"
"It's fine." Mei told me. "You check the laundry room and I'll check the bathroom." Mei got on her hands and knees and crawled under the bay window, past the laundry room, and then got up to poke her head into the bathroom.
That was obvious, I thought. Maybe she'd actually get away with this streak. There actually aren't that many people around... I poked my head into the laundry room, gave the guy a quick upnod, and then caught up with Mei down the hall.
"See! You should join me. It's actually very freeing and fun." Mei urged me.
"You seem like you've done this before."